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And these laws have not only failed, they have not only stimulated and intensified the evil, but they themselves have created a white slavery worse than that of the preposterous tales and sentimental twaddlethat circulate among the neurotic, a white slavery worse than any ever imagined by the most romanticistic of the dime novelists or by the most superheated of the professional reformers. Every one of these laws has been devised, written and enacted in the identical spirit with which the Puritans in Massachusetts branded the red letter on the scarlet woman. Every one of them is an element of that brutal and amazing conspiracy by which society makes of the girl who once “goes wrong,” to use the lightest of our animadversions, a pariah more abhorred and shunned than if she were a rotting leper on the cliffs of Molokai. She may be human, alive, with the same feelings that all the other girls in the world have; she may have within her the same possibilities, life may mean exactly the same thing to her, she may have youth with all its vague and beautiful longings, but society thunders at her such final and awful words as “lost,” “abandoned,” thrusts her beyond its pale, and causes her to feel that thereafter forever and forever, there is literally no chance of redemption for her; home, society, companionship, hope itself, all shut their obdurate doors in her face. In all the world there are just two places she may go, the brothel, or the river, and even if she choose the latter, that choice, too, is a sin. She is “lost” and the awful and appalling lie is thundered in her astonished ears by the united voices of a prurient and hypocritical society with such indomitable force and persistence that she must believe it herself, and acquiesce in its dread finality. And there is no course open to her butto go on in sin to the end of days whose only mercy is that they are apt to be brief. No off-hand moralist, even by exercising his imagination to the last degree of cruelty, has ever been able to devise such a prison as that. White slave, indeed, shackled by the heaviest chains the Puritan conscience has yet been able to forge for others!
Strange, too, since the attitude is assumed by a civilization which calls itself Christian and preaches that the old law, with its eye for an eye and its tooth for a tooth, was done away with and lost in a new and beautiful dispensation. “Neither do I condemn thee; go, and sin no more.” If the world is ever to solve this problem, it must first of all apprehend the spirit of this simple and gracious expression, do away with its old laws, its old cruelties, its old brutalities, its old stupidities, and approach the problem in that human spirit which I suspect is so very near the divine. Once in this attitude, this spirit, society will be in position to learn something from history and from human experience, something from life itself, and what it will learn first is that Puritanical laws, the hounding of the police, and all that sort of thing have never lessened prostitution in the world, but on the contrary have increased it.
What! Let them go and not do anything to them? Well, yes, if we can’t think of anything better to do to them than to hurt them a little more, push them a little farther along the road to that abyss toward which we have been hustling them. Why is it constantly necessary to do somethingtopeople? If we can’t do anything for them, when are we going to learn to let them alone? Or must this incessant interference, this meddling, this mauling and manhandling, go on in the world forever and ever?
As to what is to be done about it, since all that ever has been attempted has been so much worse in its effect than if we had never done anything, I suppose I need not feel so very much ashamed of confessing my ignorance and saying that I do not know. If it were left to me I think the first thing I should do is to repeal all the criminal laws on the subject, beginning with that most savage enactment the Puritan conscience ever devised, namely, the law declaring certain children “illegitimate,” a piece of stupid brutality and cruelty that would make a gorilla blush with shame if it were even suggested in the African jungle.
Yes, the first thing to do is to repeal all the criminal laws on the subject. They do no good, and even when it is attempted to enforce them, the result is worse than futile. I myself, with my own eyes, in the old police court where I have witnessed so many squalid tragedies, have seen a magistrate fine a street walker and then suspend the fine so that, as he explained to her in all judicial seriousness, she might go out and “earn” enough money to come back and pay it! And not a person in the court room, so habituated and conventionalized are we all, ever cracked a smile or apparently saw anything out of the way—least of all the street walker!
But it would not be enough simply to repeal theselaws from the statute books of the state; it will be necessary to accomplish the immensely more difficult task of repealing them from the human heart, where they were written long ago in anger, and hatred, and jealousy and cruelty and fear, that is in the heat of all the baser passions. What I am trying to say is that the first step in any reasonable and effective reform is an entire change of attitude on the subject, and about the only good to be expected from the agitation about white slavery, with all its preposterous exaggeration and absurd sensationalism is that it is perhaps making for a changed attitude, a new conception; if it will accomplish nothing more than to get the public mind—if there is a public mind, and not a mere public passion—to view the prostitute as a human being, very much like all the other human beings in the world, it will have been worth all it has cost in energy and emotion and credulity. If this sort of repeal can be made effective, if the prostitute can be assured of some chance in life outside the dead line which society so long ago drew for her, the first step will have been taken.
The next step possibly will be the erection of a single standard of morals. And this cannot be done by passing a law, or by turning in an alarm for the police. That means thinking, too, and education, and evolution, and all the other slow and toilsome processes of which the off-hand reformers are so impatient. This single standard will have to be raised first in each individual heart; after that it will become the attitude of the general mind.
And then the commerce in vice will have to be stopped. I do not mean prohibited by penal laws alone. Policemen cannot stop it, and policemen should have no more to do with it than firemen. In fact much of the commerce has proceeded from the fact that its regulation has been entrusted to the police. It should be a subject for the fiscal laws. It is, I assume, known by most persons that the owners of the dilapidated tenements in which for the most part prostitution is carried on, because of the “risk,” extort exorbitant rentals for them, and then on the ground that they can rent them to no one of respectability, they hold them to be so worthless that they pay little if any taxes on them. Our present tax laws of course have the effect of rewarding the slothful, the lazy and the idle, and of punishing the energetic and the enterprising producer in business, and it would be quite possible to revise the tax laws so that tenderloins would be economically impossible, because they would cease to be profitable.
In the next place, or some place in the program, there should be some sort of competent and judicious sex education. I do not know just who would impart it, since no one as yet knows very much about it, but with the earnest, sincere and devoted work that is being carried on all over the world by the scientific men and women who are studying eugenics and social hygiene, there is hope in this direction, even if it is probable that the world will not be saved by the new race of athletes that are scientifically to be bred, and may still havesome use in its affairs for the minds of its cripples who in all times have contributed so much to its advancement.
The marvelous phenomenon known as the feminist movement which the students and historians of the next two hundred years will be busy elucidating will play its part, too, for in its vast impulse toward the equality of the sexes it must not only bring the single standard of morals, but it should somehow be the means of achieving for women their economic independence. This perhaps would be the most important of all the steps to be taken in the solution of the problem. The economic environment of course is in the lives of many girls a determining factor and in this connection the minimum wage indeed has its bearing. The old Puritan laws were conceived in minds intensely preoccupied with the duty of punishing people for their sins. Prostitutes were prostitutes because they were “bad,” and when people were bad they must be punished. But now we see, or begin to see, if vaguely, that, except in metaphysics, there is no such thing in our complex human life as an absolute good or an absolute bad; we begin to discern dimly the causes of some of the conduct called bad, and to the problem of evil we begin to apply the conception of economic influences, social influences, pathological influences, and other influences most of us know little or nothing about.
Thus we begin to see that a girl’s wages, for instance, may have something to do with what we call her morals; not everything, but something. Thewages of a girl’s father have something to do with them, too, and the wages of her great grandfather for the matter of that. So the dividends on which live the delicate and charming ladies she beholds alighting from their motor cars every morning in the shopping district may have something to do with them, though she is as unconscious and as innocent of the relation as they, as ignorant as all of us are. Rents have something to do with them, and so do taxes.
But after the whole economic system has been re-adjusted and perfected and equalized, after we have the minimum wage, and the single tax, and industrial democracy, and every man gets what he produces, and economic pressure has been as scientifically adjusted as the atmospheres in a submarine torpedo boat, there is always the great law of the contrariety of things to be reckoned with, according to which the more carefully planned the event, the less it resembles the original conception. The human vision is so weak, and the great circle of life so prodigious! The solution will come, if it ever comes at all, by slow, patient, laborious, drudging study, far from the midnight session of the legislature, far from the ear and the pencil of the eager reporter, far from the platform of the sweating revivalist, far from the head office of the police. Our fondly perused pornography might expose the whole of the underworld to the light of day, the general assembly might enact successive revisions of the revised statutes for a hundred years, we might develop the most superb police organization in all history,achieving the apotheosis of the Puritan ideal with a dictagraph in every bedroom and closet in the town, and it all would be of no avail. The study must survey the whole field of social and domestic relations, until the vast mystery of life is understood, and the relation between its wide antitheses established as Tolstoy presents them in his story of the poor mother who took her daughter to the public house in the village, and the rich mother who, at the same time, took her daughter to the court at St. Petersburg. It will be found perhaps in the long run, for which so few are ever willing to remain, that the eradicable causes of prostitution are due to involuntary poverty, and the awful task is to get involuntary poverty out of the world. It is a task which has all the tremendous difficulties of constructive social labor and it is as deliberate as evolution itself. And even if it is ever accomplished, there will remain a residuum in the problem inhering in the mysteries of sex, concerning which even the wisest and most devoted of our scientists will confess they know very little as yet and have not much to tell us that will do us any good.